John Merrow recently served as a judge for the Education Writers Association’s annual reporting awards. While admiring the high quality of journalism that he read, he used his post to excoriate Arne Duncan and Margaret Spellings for a self-serving opinion piece that they wrote in The Washington Post.
“Here’s the story that shouldn’t be ignored: The proponents of disastrous ‘school reform,’ which has given us 20+ years of ‘test and punish’ & such, are now positioning themselves as voices of common sense. Exhibit A is this recent Washington Post column by two former Secretaries of Education, Arne Duncan and Margaret Spellings. One guided the Department under George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind,” and other created the infamous “Race to the Top” program.
“Their breath-taking chutzpah begins with the title of the piece: What ails education? ‘An absence of vision, a failure of will and politics.’ But their opening sentence actually tops it: “We have long benefited from a broad coalition that has advanced bold action to improve America’s education system.”
“Just exactly who are the WE that have benefited from the ‘bold action’ that the Secretaries refer to? It’s far easier to identify those who have NOT benefited from “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” Let’s start with students, because their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which everyone agrees is education’s ‘gold standard,’ has basically been flat for the 20+ years of Bush and Obama. Next on the list are teachers, whose salaries and morale have declined over the years of increasing reliance on multiple-choice testing and ‘test-and-punish’ policies. Collateral damage has been done to the occupation of teaching, which has lost prestige and now fails to attract enough candidates to fill our classrooms with qualified instructors.
“So that’s–literally–millions of students and teachers who have NOT benefited from the ‘broad coalition’ that Duncan and Spellings are so proud of.”
Who benefitted from the Duncan-Spellings billions and mandates?
Testing corporations. Ideologues who want to fracture public education. Profiteers. “And–surprise–the two former United States Secretaries of Education. One now leads the University of North Carolina higher education system, and the other is one of three Managing Partners of The Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs’ very wealthy and active education venture.”
Wow.
He then goes on to enumerate the “reformers” who are now backpedaling or mansplaining, all to avoid responsibility for the disasters of the past 20 years. They (including Duncan and Spellings) are the people we need to be reduced from, says Merrow.
This is one of Merrow’s best pieces. He is on a roll.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
I agree. I thought it was amazingly tone deaf, too.
But that’s the political tactic ed reform has employed for years. They announce that everyone “knows” they are 100% right about everything which leads to their next political tactic, which is declaring that anyone who dissents or disagrees is deliberately standing in the way of better schools. Obviously. Because everyone knows they are right, so why else would anyone ever object or dissent?
It’s the echo chamber effect. It is unimaginable to them that anyone could have a legit criticism, because “everyone knows” they are right.
Arizona is an ed reform state. It doesn’t get any more ed reformy than Arizona. They seem bound and determined to destroy every existing public school in that state, all under the banner of “reform”. They just had huge public school protests. I think it’s safe to say that “everyone” doesn’t agree with ed reformers, since the entire public school teaching force just spent two weeks making it abundantly clear they don’t agree.
This goes beyond “out of touch”. They’re unreachable. Public schools in whole states shut down and ed reform’s response is to deliver another scolding lecture on how we all have to agree MORE with their agenda.
The problem isn’t a lack of bipartisanship. The problem is these people have all adopted the exact same line and they’re entirely closed off from the possibility that some of their cherished beliefs are not proving to be true.
It’s the same model of propaganda that got us into war in Iraq. “We all knew” that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. We all “knew” that he was complicit in September 11. Anyone who disagreed with that was “with the terrorists”. It’s a very successful model, still in use today – next up, Russia (by way of Syria)!
YEP!
It’s the same propaganda to be certain, but Iraq is a world away. These billionaires have declared war on children and teachers right here at home! They send their own children to private schools, immune from the policies they enact, but millions of people, right here at home, are suffering because of them. It speaks to the lack of democratic control we have in the U.S.A. The system is rigged.
Chiara, this is right on target. But there has to be a way to break through the bubble. Part of the problem is that high-priced PR firms are at work on this behind the scenes. Billionaire-funded messaging is hard to defeat head-on, and if you try to fight them on their turf, it actually helps them sharpen their weapons. There are ways to finesse their attacks, though.
I only wish more of the teacher protesters were targeting high-stakes standardized testing and test prep in addition to low teacher pay and chronic underfunding. Now that would be something!
I think the time is ripe for another rally in DC. With all that’s been happening this year, a 2019 rally would surely dwarf the 2011 crowd.
I think the most insulting part of the whole ed reform narrative is how they insist on portraying themselves as some rag tag band of revolutionaries “speaking truth to power”
Donald Trump is the third US President IN A ROW to adopt their agenda, lock step. They could not be more powerful than they are.
How much power do they want, exactly? They have the President(s) they have the majority of congress, they have the majority of state legislatures and they have 5 or 6 billionaires who jump in when the politicians they own can’t deliver.
Can there be ANY dissent? They need to control 100% of public education and 100% of elected officials at all ;levels?
They’ve already effectively purged all dissenters in the federal government. That’s not powerful enough?
Great point, Chiara. They think they are rebels, when they are in reality the status quo.
“. . . their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which everyone agrees is education’s ‘gold standard,’. . .”
“John, John, John, John. . . ” said in a teacher’s exasperated voice “How many times do you have to be told? NAEP suffers all the same onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods that Noel Wilson identified over 20 years ago in his never refuted or rebutted “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
What’s that you say John? You don’t know what onto-epistemological means?
It means the fundamental conceptual underpinnings. The NAEP has so many errors and falsehoods built into the process that any results are completely invalid.”
“What’s that John? ‘But everyone says it’s the “gold standard” of standardized tests.’ No, not everyone says that, John. John, we’ve been through this before also. If everyone says that the world is flat are you going to believe them? An intelligent boy would change his view of something when shown that the something is riddled with error and falsehood, wouldn’t he, John?”
‘I guess he would, schoolmarm, maybe I should change mine.”
As much as I agree with the onto-epistemological critique of standards and testing, we might want to consider the possibility that it isn’t catching on.
Maybe the critique needs to be closer to where the rubber meets the road–in the arena of weeping and vomiting children, mindless test-prep worksheets, incomprehensible test items, liars with statistics, and so on.
People need an emotional hook to get them to pay attention. That’s how bogus reform messages gained currency, and why they still hold sway. (George Lakoff isn’t just a name–he knows what he’s talking about.)
That’s not to denigrate philosophy. I think we should also be asking, What would the American Pragmatists do in a situation like this? That brings John Dewey back into the conversation, but we should probably also be reading both William Jameses and other past American thinkers for guidance. I’m not an expert on any of them, just curious about how they might look at these crass apologists for bogus reform.
I understand that “Idiot America”* needs a hook to reel it in. Rationo-logical thought certainly holds little sway in many people’s minds, sad as that is.
As it is, I’ve attempted to distill the falsehoods and errors down to one main concept: That of the impossibility of “measuring” student learning. That measurement meme, that everything can be quantified and then monetized is what is behind all of the deforms. So I’ve been attacking that meme by asking: What is the agreed upon standard unit of measurement that the supposed measuring devices, standardized tests use?
……………………………………….silence!
Why?
Because there is no standard unit of measurement of learning, just as there is no standard unit of measure of love, hate, friendship, loyalty, and all sorts of areas of human essence, character and/or self.
So, let’s quit with the lying and fraudulent spiel that standardized testing is beneficial to/for the students. It’s not! It’s a bastardization of the teaching and learning process.
*See Charles Pierce’s Work “Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free” His main thesis has three parts:
1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2) Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.
3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.
Duane, I completely endorse your crusade, but I believe it isn’t just idiots who make decisions emotionally. It’s everybody. It’s part of human nature.
I’ve come to believe that we decide first–almost instantaneously–and rationalize the decision later. Of course, on reflection some of our rationalizations make more sense to us than others. (Again, see George Lakoff.)
You can become a Zen master, which will mostly eliminate emotional reactivity, or you can stand back and try to look at things objectively, or you can stop and try to put yourself in someone else’s shoes… but most people can’t put emotions aside for very long. And they shouldn’t have to. The only decision makers that don’t rely on emotions–first and foremost–are robots. Like the cyborg (or whatever he was) Data on the Starship Enterprise.
Also, we tend to think in metaphors and stories that have emotional content built into them. Exploiting this fact has put the oligarchs, demagogues, and bogus reformers in the driver’s seat. And it’s why people used to obey monarchs.
To me, that’s why the Enlightenment was such a huge deal, and it’s upon those big intellectual leaps into empiricism, objectivity, and logic that the USA was founded. Unfortunately, it’s also where we picked up our fantasies of measurement and control. That’s why we have to acknowledge that emotions help shape our understanding of the world. AND why we need to put emotional content into our messaging–not to alarm people, but to get them to listen. That’s what I believe anyway.
We can’t give up logic and evidence-based thinking, but to me it doesn’t make sense to deny the importance of intuition, emotion, metaphor, storytelling, and the like in our public discourse.
The key is to tell TRUE STORIES, and to call out the fake reformers when they perpetuate false ones. (Which they do every single day.)
The way we frame our arguments makes all the difference in the world. That’s why I keep recommending George Lakoff. He understands how people think, and understands why the exploiters of built-in human biases are currently winning most public arguments (to the severe detriment of the public). They’re currently getting away with theft on a grand scale–the theft of the public good. The average person isn’t an idiot. They’re just not paying attention. Either that, or they’re buying a cleverly framed phony narrative. (The people who propagate those phony narratives are very good at it, and well paid.)
Readers, please check out the George Lakoff Twitter account. It only takes few minutes.
icompleat,
Yes, I am familiar with Lakoff (having read his writings for all of this century and before) and agree with many of his thoughts. And I understand the emotional, intuition, feeling aspect that each person puts into their being-those stories that we have concocted to make sense of existence. While those stories work for the individual, that does not mean that they should be seen as adequate descriptors that all can agree upon, that is where logico-rational scientific thinking comes into play. While not being much of a “hierarchical” type person, I have to side with rationo-logical thought over emotional, intuitional thought as a means for more thorough, truthful communication among people.
Even though it is through the “hook” of emotions that Bernays realized last century was the key to influencing others beliefs and behavior. That type of “influencing” is manipulative at best, downright deceitful most of the time.
And that is where Pierce’s concept of Idiot America comes into play. It’s not that people are necessarily “idiots” (as you imply by your comments and I don’t agree with), but that “idiotness” is really an inability to rationo-logically think things through. That inability has its roots in America’s underlying theme of all being equal therefore all thought and beliefs have equal value. They don’t! And yes, I am certain that not all thinking/being is equally valid and “scalable” (oops, sorry, couldn’t resist using that despicable edudeformer term), in other words that not all thoughts, beliefs and being are good, decent, or not even adequate for all. And that includes my way of thinking/being as I’m certainly not that “all knowing”.
And you are correct about Enlightenment thinking being a radical change of course from prior thinking of the majority of humans. Unfortunately, here in America, that opposite of rationo-logical thinking has gainsayed it. We need to regain the upper hand against all the emotional, intuitive, superstitious thinking as exemplified by religious beliefs, political affiliations, nationalistic fervor, etc. . . .
Until that happens we will continue down the rabbit hole of absurdity that is the thinking that all thought and beliefs have equal value.
Duane: No, I don’t think people are idiots. People are human beings, born biased and persuadable. But they can be fortified against bias. Maybe psychologists and philosophers are already fortified against bias, but the average person isn’t. In the past few years I’ve tried to counter my own biases. That’s one reason I don’t dismiss Trump voters out of hand as dupes or racists.
My comments are based on the idea that we need practical and legitimate means to displace the fake education stories that are currently beating up on true education stories–stories that need to break into the mainstream. Who wants to be stuck in an eddy while the world rushes past us? Not me.
icompleat,
Thanks for the clarification and explanation.
I’m not sure at all though whether I’d include psychologists in with philosophers as being fortified against bias. Psychology has it’s own internal biases and contradictions. I’m currently reading a dissertation proposal in the psychology realm and there is a lot that doesn’t sit well with me in that proposal. I’m not sure how to handle discussing with the person (known since childhood) what I see as those contradiction and biases. We’ll see.
You are wise to not “dismiss Trump voters out of hand”. I know quite a few who voted for him, deceived I believe, into thinking he was going to “drain the swamp”. Some are having buyers remorse others double down on “give him a chance type thinking”.
And you are correct to say that “we need practical and legitimate means to displace the fake education stories. . . ” I thoroughly agree! And that is why I attempt to get at the root/base falsehoods and errors involved in those stories. If an education practice and/or discourse is based on error-filled and and false notions/ideas, we have to attack at that point as that is where the house of cards built on the sand of lies can be most easily destroyed, at least in my mind. It seems to me that until we thoroughly debunk and deny those errors and falsehoods we are in essence pissing in the wind and only serve their purposes by playing their language and mind games. But without identifying those false essences we have no where to begin the fight. I hope that makes sense.
Thanks for the good discussion, look forward to more!
Duane, thanks for the reply. I agree that attacking the false assumptions has to be a top priority. There are too many bad assumptions built into the current system (and the bogus reform argument).
I’m going to be a reluctant commenter here. I read the blog daily–not the whole thing–but I’m not likely to comment unless I think someone is spreading misinformation about teachers. I’m still trying to decide whether to refute the false claim that “English teaching is dead.” (It may be in danger, but it definitely isn’t dead.)
My next comments will be directed toward the two guys who personally attacked me while I was trying to defend some outspoken teachers a while back. Meanwhile, I’ll definitely be reading as many of the thoughtful commenters as I have time for.
I wish you would continue commenting as your posts are insightful and informative, well thought out (even if I don’t always agree, eh)!
In the op ed piece, Duncan and Spelling say that ed reformers believe existing public schools will always be the basis of the US K-12 system.
If they “believe” that they sure don’t show it. I can’t point to a single improvement in Ohio public schools since they captured state government.
They’re lousy on PUBLIC schools, which is a problem, because 90% of the country attends the schools they are phasing out.
People are (understandably) upset to find this out, since no one in ed rfeorm bothered to tell them The Master Plan and people don’t really want their kids in a public school system that lawmakers have decided must be eradicated because that’s not going to work out well for their kids, although it does achieve ed reform’s ideological goals.
They probably should have told the public they were phasing out public schools, you know, some time BEFORE they started.
I think they mean that charter schools are public schools, which they are not.
Instead of berating us all and insisting we see their unique genius, why don’t ed reformers offer some actual benefit to kids in existing public schools?
Say we want to keep the public schools we have instead of adopting their contractor model. Do they have anything at all to offer?
Arne Duncan likes business slogans, so here’s one- what’s the value-add of hiring an ed reformer? Why would I hire devotees of this religion over non-believers?
Thank you for telling the truth about the impact of reform. These deformers live in a bubble that excludes everyone except an elite few. Calling our disastrous educational policies bold is an understatement. Our policies have been reckless, thoughtless and diabolical. You should submit your response for publication. We have heard too much from team “reform” and their well paid cheerleaders. It is about time we considered the 90%.
Because I have a choice this election year in Ohio. For the first time in 20 years I can vote for the ed reformer or I can vote for a non-believer.
Why should I hire the ed reformer? If the answer is ‘charters and vouchers” recognize that’s irrelevant to 90% of families in the state- they attend public schools.
So what’s the ed reform plan for public schools? Can’t reach for “replace”, remember! We’re all familiar with the “replace” idea. Try to come up with another one.
If they don’t offer any value to public school families there’s no reason public school families should vote for them and pay them and all the stern lectures in the world won’t change that.
Duncan and Spellings problem is they only have on solution, and it’s “privatize”- but that was never debated let alone voted on.
That was a choice for Virginia voters, too.
Mind you, the “progressive” was the ed reformer.
Luckily, the “progressive” ed reformer got defeated. And the “non-progressive” strong supporter of public schools won.
When Michelle Rhee freezes over.
Oh, wait…
That was in answer to the question “when will Duncan and Spellings admit the failure of their Rheeform policies?”
Not to be overly religious in criticism of Rheeform, but Rhee is not the devil. She signed a deal with him, one of many who did. They will pay.
Yep, Rhee sold her soul to the devil and the devil paid her well … when will the devil’s invoice be due? Soon, I hope.
“Hell on Earth”
There is no Hell
So justice bell
Will have to ring on earth
To wait for God
To punish fraud
Is moot, for what it’s worth
I left the following comment on John Merrow’s blog post:
John,
Thank you for the clear description of who has benefitted from phony education reform, and who has suffered. I saw my school in Oakland brought into a state of demoralization due to the overbearing threats of NCLB. And once President Obama came along, we experienced further destruction due to the demands that test scores be included in teacher and administrator evaluations.
I agree that there is excellent education journalism being done, and am glad it is being recognized and celebrated. There is an important footnote, however. that deserves attention related to the Education Writers Association, a non-profit, sponsored by many of the same foundations that have actively promoted the “reforms” we now decry.
My blog, Living in Dialogue, won several awards from EWA, including a first place prize for a series of posts analyzing the Common Core from the perspective of an experienced classroom teacher. The year after I won that award, the EWA changed its rules so that independent, unpaid bloggers such as myself were no longer able to participate in their awards process. At the same time, reporters working on corporate-sponsored projects like the Seattle Times’ “Education Lab” remain eligible.
I have suggested to the EWA that this exclusion means that they are leaving out bloggers that are doing important work — including former and current classroom teachers. People like Seattle teacher Jesse Hagopian, whose blog, I Am An Educator, is sharing valuable analysis of the nexus of race, class and education reform. Mercedes Schneider, whose Deutch29 blog continues to dig into the nitty gritty facts from her position as a high school teacher in Louisiana — and dozens more, covering education issues from the grassroots.
It is true that these education writers do not meet all the criteria of traditional journalism. However, as the ownership (and sponsorship) of media becomes more and more concentrated, it is ever more crucial that programs like the EWA conferences create space for such unfettered voices. I hope you will join me in encouraging the EWA to return to allowing independent bloggers to fully participate in their events and writing contests.
Excellent points, and the more they are circulated the better.
The link, which I forgot to add:
https://themerrowreport.com/2018/05/11/how-strong-is-education-reporting/
Excellent point.
Why should a corporate sponsored writer be eligible and not an independent blogger?
Being rejected by a Deformer propaganda oulet is a badge of honor.
How long before that “WE” attempted to gut or end the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which everyone agrees is education’s ‘gold standard.’
When that “Gold Standard” reveals the lies of the “WE”, why should they allow it to continue to exist?
If they can’t control the message they want to expose to the public, they will kill that messenger, the NAEP.
I can’t find the blog post referred to (even though I’m supposed to be subscribed to it).
sorry, I forgot to add the link.
Here it is:
https://themerrowreport.com/2018/05/11/how-strong-is-education-reporting/
I added to the post as well.
Oh, to answer the question of the post: Never!
Not only “never,” but Merrow doesn’t even realize that’s the answer. He’s coming around–somewhat–but he’s been a deformer for a long time.
Merrow also doesn’t recognize that he is among the “we” who benefitted. Now he fashions himself as a savior.
“Save us from the Saviors”
Save us from the saviors
All the superheroes
Duncan with his waivers
Chetty with his zeros
Save us from the Evas
Billionaires and pols
Save us from the divas
Save us from the trolls
Save us from the testing
Save us from the VAMs
Save us from molesting
Save us from the scams
Save us from the charters
Save our public schools
Save us from the Harvards
Save us from the fools
Gosh, it would take a real superhero with superhuman powers to save us from all that.
Let’s not forget that Merrow was once Rhee’s lover boy, metaphorically speaking.
How quickly he forgot.
John Merrow once said
“One blogger said “[Rhee’s] a blip. She’ll be forgotten. She’s just a business model”…Well, I don’t think so.”
Whoever that blogger is, she was right and Merrow was wrong.
Merrow also said in the same video
“It was great fun following her for 3 years on the News Hour. All twelve segments are posted on the News Hour, including the one where she fired someone”
What kind of person considers it “Great fun” to watch someone firing someone else on TV?
Merrow also says “Maybe she was John the Baptist”
Yes, right, and Arne Duncan was Jesus Christ.
The Washington Post piece by Arne Duncan and Margaret Spellings was some warmed over tripe. It was some seriously-bad drivel about education presented by two terrible Secretaries of Education.
The “crisis” outlined by Duncan and Spellings is a myth that’s been perpetrated for a long time. In the recent past by it was outlined by Arthur Bestor in his book “Educational Wastelands. A generation later, it was A Nation at Risk, warning of a “rising tide of mediocrity” that threatened Americans national security. Both were egregiously in error.
The Sandia Report (Journal of Educational Research, May/June, 1993), published in the wake of A Nation at Risk, concluded that:
“..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”
“youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”
“business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”
“The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any previous generation.”
But the critics kept on with the big lies. More states enacted “high standards” and forced testing. No Child Left Behind mandated even more testing, and punishments. Still, the critics – increasingly funded by conservative foundations and corporations anxious to divert attention from their own failures and complicity in causing the near-fatal breakdown of the economy – continue with their attacks on public schools. The “answers” to the fake “crisis” are always the same: more “accountability,” charters, and vouchers.
Duncan and Spellings extol “the American meritocracy.” That too – as measured by SAT and ACT and state standardized test scores – is a myth. As testing expert W. James Popham pointed out, most state tests are “instructionally insensitive, that is, they can’t detect even first-rate instruction on the part of teachers…” Even Henry Goddard, who pushed intelligence testing relentlessly, later admitted that testing “could be perceived as justifying the richness of the rich and the poverty of the poor; they legitimized the existing social order.”
The Center for Education Policy Analysis reported in 2011that “the income achievement gap (defined as the average achievement difference between a child from a family at the 90th percentile of the family income distribution and a child from a family at the 10th percentile) is now nearly TWICE as large as the black-white achievement gap.”
The Washington Post reported last year on the latest ACT and SAT results, and even The Post acknowledged this:
“New results from the nation’s most widely used college admission test highlight in detailed fashion the persistent achievement gaps between students who face disadvantages and those who don’t…Disadvantaged students face complex challenges connected to their families, neighborhoods and schools.”
Achievement gaps are not isolated to the United States. Richard Rothstein explained the critical and perverse ties between socioeconomics, school achievement and education policy in ‘Class and the Classroom’ (2004):
“Class background influences achievement everywhere. The ability of schools to overcome the disadvantages of less-literate homes is not a peculiar American failure but a universal reality…An international reading survey of 15-years olds, conducted in 2000, found a strong relationship in almost every nation between parental occupation and student literacy. The gap between the literacy of children of the highest-status workers (doctors, professors, lawyers) and the lowest-status workers (waiters, waitresses, taxi-drivers, mechanics) was even greater in Germany and the United Kingdom than it was in the United States…Remarkably, the [U.S. Department of Education] published this conclusion at the same time that it was guiding a bill through Congress – the No Child Left Behind Act – that demanded every school in the nation abolish social class differences in achievement within 12 years.”
Margaret Spellings infamously said this about No Child Left Behind: “I talk about No Child Left Behind like Ivory soap: It’s 99.9 percent pure…There’s not much needed in the way of change.” That was flat-out idiocy.
As Rothstein noted nearly a decade-and-a-half ago:
“Twenty years ago, Betty Hart and Todd Risley, two researchers from the University of Kansas, visited families from different social classes to monitor the conversations between parents and toddlers. Hart and Risley found that, on average, professional parents spoke more than 2,000 words per hour to their children, working-class parents spoke about 1,300, and welfare mothers spoke about 600. So by age 3, the children of professionals had vocabularies that were nearly 50 percent greater than those of working class children and twice as large as those of welfare children…Deficits like these cannot be made up by schools alone, no matter how high the teachers’ expectations. For all children to achieve the same goals, the less advantaged would have to enter school with verbal fluency that is similar to the fluency of middle-class children.”
If we truly value equality, it is imperative that we take the citizenship purpose of public schooling seriously. Arne Duncan and Margaret Spellings do not, and they didn’t when they served as education secretaries.
Aristotle referred to this critical mission schooling as the development and nurturance of “the character of democracy.” University of Chicago social scientist Earl Johnson referred to citizenship education as “the supreme end of education in a democracy.” Horace Mann viewed public education as “the balance-wheel of the social machinery” in a democratic society.
The goal of public education should not be focused on “standards” and test scores, but on greater equity, with all of the attendant policy programs aligned. If public schools are to genuinely provide opportunity, then they also have to be seen as “an instrument to even out social inequality.” That is simply not the case in the U.S. And it isn’t the case made by Duncan and Spellings.
But it should be.
As to John Merrow and the Education Writer’s Association, it’s fair to say that Merrow has improved, and there’s lots of room for improvement at EWA.
Just two short years ago, Merrow said that “Education reporting has never been better…”
He’s wrong.
To take but one example, Emily Richmond, “the public editor of the Education Writers Association,” wrote a piece in The Atlantic about “girls in STEM.”
Richmond said that “just 43 percent of U.S. eighth graders tested met or exceeded the benchmark for proficiency” on the newest NAEP test, the Technology and Engineering Literacy assessment. This is important, Richmond asserted, because “it’s one of the few means of comparing student achievement among states.”
Then Richmond posed this question, answer, and explanation:
“Why does this matter? These are skills that experts say Americans must have if they are to compete in a global marketplace. U.S. students typically have middling performance on international assessments gauging math and science ability.”
The implications are far-ranging. Emily Richmond, a national education reporter, is telling, or at the very least, strongly suggesting to readers that Americans students just can’t cut it – they aren’t “proficient” – and American economic competitiveness in the “global marketplace” is threatened.
This claim is the very same as that made for the necessity of the Common Core State Standards, which were funded by Bill Gates. Interestingly, the Education Writers Association is also funded by Bill Gates, along with conservative groups like the Kern, Dell and Walton Foundations.
But the claim is demonstrably false. America is already competitive in the global marketplace (it’s #2 in the World Economic Forum’s latest competitiveness rankings), and when it loses its competitive edge it’s not because of student test scores but because of stupid economic policies and decisions.
But Emily Richmond says nary a word about this.
Nor does she make any mention at all that there’s a glut of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) jobs in the U.S.
A 2004 RAND study “found no consistent and convincing evidence that the federal government faces current or impending shortages of STEM workers…there is little evidence of such shortages in the past decade or on the horizon.”
A 2007 study by Lowell and Salzman (‘Into the Eye of the Storm’) found no STEM shortage Indeed, Lowell and Salzman found that “the supply of S&E-qualified graduates is large and ranks among the best internationally. Further, the number of undergraduates completing S&E studies has grown, and the number of S&E graduates remains high by historical standards.” The “education system produces qualified graduates far in excess of demand.”
Six years ago Beryl Lieff Benderly wrote this stunning statement in the Columbia Journalism Review (‘What Scientists Shortage?’):
“Leading experts on the STEM workforce, have said for years that the US produces ample numbers of excellent science students. In fact, according to the National Science Board’s authoritative publication Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, the country turns out three times as many STEM degrees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors.”
As Michael Teitelbaum wrote in ‘The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage.’ also in The Atlantic (March, 2014),
“The truth is that there is little credible evidence of the claimed widespread shortages in the U.S. science and engineering workforce.”
Teitelbaum added this: “A compelling body of research is now available, from many leading academic researchers and from respected research organizations such as the National Bureau of Economic Research, the RAND Corporation, and the Urban Institute. No one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher…All have concluded that U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings—the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more.”
But Emily Richmond says nothing at all about any of this. Does she not even read the magazine for which she occasionally writes?
The EWA website states that “EWA has worked for more than 70 years to help journalists get the story right.”
It would appear that the EWA needs lots and lots of remediation.
“I talk about No Child Left Behind like Ivory soap: It’s 99.9 percent pure.” — Margaret Spellings
Well, to be fair to Ms Spellings (couldn’t resist), it was pure. Pure BS.